TEA rates Big Spring ISD as 'unacceptable'

Published 1:07 pm, Friday, July 29, 2011

BIG SPRING -- According to data released Friday by the Texas Education Agency, the only acceptable campus in Big Spring ISD is Moss Elementary.

The district and its seven other schools received accountability ratings of unacceptable based on indicators measured through the Academic Excellence Indicator System.

Seven of the district's 10 indicators that targeted science and math were unacceptable. Only 62 percent of students passed the mathematics portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test administered this spring.

To Superintendent Steven Saldivar, the ratings weren't a surprise.

"When the scores come out, I don't overreact," Saldivar said. "We understand where our focus is, and we have different measures that we use to see where we are."

The district made a decision not to focus on standardized testing, but instead focus on customization of student learning, he said.

Big Spring ISD partnered with the Schlechty Center, a nonprofit focused on "compliance to those focused on engagement" in 2009 and tries to individualize student learning, Saldivar said. The individual attention is one of the district's primary concerns.

"Testing puts a lot of pressure on kids and it puts a lot of pressure on teachers," Saldivar said. "It's really a way of misrepresenting what school's about. Learning occurs in many different ways and acquiring knowledge is a complex thing. To try and oversimplify learning by taking a test doesn't really make sense."

Performance on standardized tests and state accountability ratings are not a fair way of measuring whether schools and districts are doing an adequate job, said Saldivar, who became superintendent in July 2009.

Big Spring ISD does not focus on offering test preparation to the district's 3,900 students, he said.

From 2004 to 2010, only three unacceptable ratings were given to a Big Spring ISD campus. The other 53 campus ratings were acceptable or recognized.

This year, all nine of Bauer Elementary's indicators were rated unacceptable and six of Kentwood Elementary's nine indicators were unacceptable.

As a whole, the district struggled with math and science scores. However, at the individual campus levels, reading/ELA scores also were an issue.

Saldivar said this is not a reflection of what the students are learning in the schools and encourages anyone who may doubt whether their children are learning to talk with him and other district administrators.

"Just because ratings come out and they look bad does not mean we have a bad school," Saldivar said. "It was just on a particular day and a particular test that students didn't do well on."